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Getting Hurt in a Meaningful Way

Misconnected

Savant
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Jan 18, 2012
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Myself and a couple of others are kind of working on a homebrewed version of the 40K RPG. To the uninitiated, it's essentially the same as WFRP, and to the even more uninitiated, it's not vastly different from D&D3e.

One of our major issues with the system is how injuries are handled. It essentially has 3 different kinds.

Fatigue levels gives you a non-cumulative 10% penalty to everything, your max fatigue is equal to your Toughness (think Constitution in D&D). Beyond max fatigue, you pass out for a brief period.

Wounds is Hit Points by another name. The only notable difference between D&D HP and 40K RPG Wounds, is that while the magnitude of inflicted damage is close to identical, Wound pools stay within the 15-30 range in the 40K RPG.

Critical Injuries are "real" injuries and come in 10 different levels of severity. Basically, critical injuries are stuff like getting your arm broken or your head cut off. The former would be something like a level 3 injury, the latter a level 8 injury.

...

What we'd like is something akin to the Critical Injury system alone, but not so hideously cumbersome that you have to every injury up on a table and spend an hour noting down the effects on your charsheet.

Present thinking is to have damage have cause 1 injury, regardless of the magnitude. Injuries will stack, and each injury will cause a loss of -10 points of Toughness (think constitution -2), as well as a loss of -10 of one or more other Characteristics (think Ability Scores), depending on the hit location (head = loss of Per/WP, body = loss of player chosen, legs = loss of Ag, arms = loss of WS/BS).

That's reasonably simple. Getting a leg injury, for example, means you can take fewer injuries over all and that you'll move slower (Agility -10, or movement & Dexterity penalties, if you prefer). As far keeping up the pace and having injuries actually be bad, this concept works flawlessly. It's a bit more lethal than the 40K RPG, but not so much that anyone is going to get killed by just one or two unlucky dice rolls.

The problem is that I do like at least slightly variable damage, and I do like the occasional elaborate critical "bad guy's chest explodes, impaling nearest minion with shards of ribcage" injury.

Our present concept doesn't have leeway for variable damage, and scaling the modifiers wouldn't really fix that. It would just make the system overly random.

There's no particular reason Critical Injuries can't be incorporated, but so far none of us have thought of a neat way to do it. My own suggestion is that if the damage done to the character exceeds the character's current Toughness (think Constitution... again), the character suffers +1 level of Critical Injury from the relevant table. I don't know whether the idea works, but I guess we'll be trying it out in two weeks.

...

Point of this long-ass rant? Well, I'd like thoughts, criticism, ideas, suggestions and whatever the hell else you guys might feel like contributing.

Oh and, if you happen to have any great concepts for jobs that expendable little acolytes of the Inquisition might do as part of their cover, I'd love to hear all about those too.
 

lightbane

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Black Crusade did something similar, meaning that critical attacks inflict non-lethal crit. damage, so even the lowliest thug could break your arm with a well-placed shot, giving you some penalties but not losing the arm in the process (although you can temporally lose use of it, at worst).
 

Father Walker

Potato Ranger
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To the uninitiated, it's essentially the same as WFRP, and to the even more uninitiated, it's not vastly different from D&D3e.

Does not compute. WFRP similar to 3E? :eek:

What's the fuzz with the complex injury stuff? Can't you go the WFRP way?

This kind of supplement would be great, though, if it included shitload of carees like in 1st and 2nd edition of Warhammer.
 

Misconnected

Savant
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Does not compute. WFRP similar to 3E? :eek:

Conceptually, they're very similar. The notable differences are the classes and the modifier hunting.


What's the fuzz with the complex injury stuff? Can't you go the WFRP way?

Let's say you're a D&D character with 10HP, and you just got punched in the gut with an axe for 5 Damage. How do you relate to what just happened? Are you now half dead? If so, how do you know? Are you uninjured? If so, how the fuck did you manage that?

What I'm trying to get at, is that the mechanics that govern the state of your character's health exist only on the meta layer. They don't tie into the actual fiction in any way. And yes, the Games Workshop RPG systems are much more connected to the actual fiction in their handling of these things. Your character won't have to break through the 4th wall and have a look at his character sheet to be able to tell if he's just gone from uninjured to half dead. But all of the systems have far greater granularity on the meta layer than on the in-fiction layer, and my group and I thinks that's a bad thing.

Not so much because we're hardcore simulationists. We aren't really. But because the totality of the mechanics end up feeling half-assed and self-contradictory to us, when half the health related mechanics are strictly sim'y and the other half mostly aren't at all. It feels schizophrenic. And it feels like half the health-related decisions characters make, they make for no reason they're actually aware of.

"My char bravely runs away, because... Uhm... The God-Emperor just whispered in his ear that he should! Yeah, that's it!"


This kind of supplement would be great, though, if it included shitload of carees like in 1st and 2nd edition of Warhammer.

You won't be rolling Characteristics. Their base values will be Career dependent. The Careers will not be remotely as narrow as DH or RT. Instead the Careers are essentially the major Adepta, Navy, Guard and Underworld.

Careers determine your starting Job options, and later Jobs will almost certainly tend to have Career requirements. But basically, once you've picked a Career and a starting Job, subsequent things will work rather a lot like WFRP Jobs.

Exactly how huge the shitload of Jobs will be, depends greatly on the rest of my group. They're writing most of them. The amount will also have a major impact on just how Career-specific Jobs will tend to be.

Numbers of things we aim for:
25 Homeworlds. We have 7.
27 Background Packages. We have 8.
9 Careers. We have 9.
75 Jobs. We have 11.

Obviously nothing is even remotely playtested. But that's stuff we pretty much have, flavour text included (and in English). Assuming it ever gets done, we'll stick it in a proper "core rules" format, possibly even as a PDF. Though we're finding HTML immensely more useful.
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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Critical Injuries are "real" injuries and come in 10 different levels of severity. Basically, critical injuries are stuff like getting your arm broken or your head cut off. The former would be something like a level 3 injury, the latter a level 8 injury.

So it's possible to be MORE injured than missing your head? Sounds pretty terminal to me.
 

Misconnected

Savant
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"your skull explodes in a storm of splinters and red mist. Everyone within 3 meters suffers d5 damage"

Critical hits aren't just about how badly you're hurt. They're also about how big of an insult gets added to the injury. Crits are fun stuff :)
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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I rather liked burning wheels way of handling injuries. Players had an injury track with different tolerances for what constituted a superficial/light/moderate/critical/mortal wound derived from their base attributes. All injuries received were noted down (and later treated seperately), but also gave the player a cumultative penalty to all attributes/skills. Skills that got reduced to 0 through injuries could no longer be used (character was in too much pain to focus on the task). If an attribute - any attribute - was reduced to 0 through wound modifiers, the character lost consciousness and was effectively downed. Serious/critical wounds could result in people bleeding out if surgery wasn't performed shortly after.

The injury track had a number of pips at various exponents with tolerances for wound grades noted along the way. If players received a wound of exponent X, that pip would be filled and subsequent wounds of that exponent scaled up until a non-filled pip was available. That way it was possible to get downed by a bunch of grazing cuts or just one big, high-exponent blow to the head.
 

Father Walker

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Conceptually, they're very similar. The notable differences are the classes and the modifier hunting.

1st edition WFRP is more like O/AD&D on acid. 2nd edition is like polished 1st Ed, but doesn't go THAT far from the original. I fail to see anything remotely similar to 3E, apart from the common roots.

IMO, the whole WFRP game is about a bunch of AD&D guys who never got past 0th or 1st level. 3E on the other hand...

Let's say you're a D&D character with 10HP, and you just got punched in the gut with an axe for 5 Damage. How do you relate to what just happened? Are you now half dead? If so, how do you know? Are you uninjured? If so, how the fuck did you manage that?

You either accept the simplification for the sake of playability or not. This debate is 40 years old, so no point in going through this stuff again.

What I'm trying to get at, is that the mechanics that govern the state of your character's health exist only on the meta layer.

So, basically Toughness and other attributes become HP. Go for it if you like it.

Not wanting to hold you back or anything, but I'm afraid it might turn out to be a complex, sim-heavy game.
 

J1M

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Unless you are in an ultra high-magic or high-tech universe isn't all of this just pointless wankery?

Any one of these basic wounds you are talking about would be enough to largely remove someone from a battle and would certainly be enough to kill them within a few days.
 

Father Walker

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Jesus, Burning Wheel is a god damn clusterfuck. I've read the rulebook and wouldn't touch it again with a 10' pole.
 
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Ulminati

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Jesus, Burning Wheel is a god damn clusterfuck. I've read the rulebook and wouldn't touch it again with a 10' pole.

Not true. Burning wheel runs on some unintuitive abstractions (such as abstract wealth) but it actually flows really, really well and lends itself to far better narratives with actual player influence, as opposed ot the GM dictating most of the story flow. I was a sceptic too, but once my group of regulars picked up BW it has been one of our regular fallbacks.

Duel of Wits is pretty goddamn awesome and BITs usually results in some really interesting characters. Not to mention combat is pretty scarce because, once the Fight! planners go out, players DO get hurt in meaningful ways. And they can go for several sessions with niggling injuries as the result of an ill-planned combat.
 

Father Walker

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Not saying it isn't working for you, it's just too complex for my taste, though. The premise of the game is great, but the final effect is, well, not a game I'd like to play.
 

Misconnected

Savant
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I rather liked burning wheels way of handling injuries.

I've only just picked up a copy, so I'm not sure exactly how useful it is to us. But at a glance it appears to do exactly what we want to do, so I'm pretty sure you've at least brought us a long step closer to our goal. Thank you very much, Ulminati.

1st edition WFRP is more like O/AD&D on acid. 2nd edition is like polished 1st Ed, but doesn't go THAT far from the original. I fail to see anything remotely similar to 3E, apart from the common roots.

I didn't call them an exact match, I said they were conceptually very similar. I made the comparison because I was trying to enable people to participate in the discussion, and people are overwhelmingly much more likely to be familiar with D&D3/3.5/PF than any other TTRPG system. The closest relatives of the GW-RPG systems are probably BRP/CoC, I think. But in the likely event that people reading this topic has no idea what either of those are, such a comparison really doesn't help them understand what I was talking about in the OP.

You either accept the simplification for the sake of playability or not. This debate is 40 years old, so no point in going through this stuff again.

You asked why my group doesn't want a health mechanic that doesn't work equally on the meta and fiction layers. I tried to give you an informative answer. If you didn't want it, you probably shouldn't have asked.

The problem with the debate you refer to isn't its age. While it is potentially useful to my group to discuss with outsiders why a given mechanic does or doesn't work for us, it's not something you can use to generalise. Or at least, you shouldn't. If you do, the result is that all health mechanics are great and suck ass, because they all work great and totally wreck the game for someone, somewhere.

HP aren't bad, they're just not what we want. And again, I didn't randomly assault you with the reason we want something else. You asked me to tell you.

So, basically Toughness and other attributes become HP. Go for it if you like it.

Not wanting to hold you back or anything, but I'm afraid it might turn out to be a complex, sim-heavy game.


Essentially, yes. And if it wasn't clear before, allow me to stress that I too worry about housekeeping.

As long as the stuff a player has to do is quick, complexity isn't a major issue for us. Speed, however, is important.
It's also important to us to try to map what happens on the meta layer to what happens on the fiction layer; all injury the system tracks should affect the fiction.
And it's important to us that the system doesn't become so lethal that characters can't reasonably be expected to survive at least a few in-game years of activity.
It's important to us that the product of the system isn't wildly dissimilar to the real world.

And finally, it's important to us that the system can produce extremely over the top grimdark results.

All of those things are at least somewhat mutually exclusive. If a possible outcome of stabbing a guy in the face is to punch right through it an into the next guy's face, then you have grimdarkery, but also something that almost certainly requires you to look shit up on a table and thus slows down the game. If character's can't be insta-killed they're a lot more likely to survive in-game years of activity, but the health system is also likely to be completely alien to real world expectations.

It's tricky shit, really. Hence the thread.


Unless you are in an ultra high-magic or high-tech universe isn't all of this just pointless wankery?

The setting is both high-magic and high-tech. Set 40,000 years in the future, a galaxy-spanning human and extremely xenophobic empire is ruled by a catatonic god that eats the souls of a thousand of his subjects every day. Magic is fuelled by a hell-dimension that twists and corrupts all it touches. Technology is the domain of a mad and secretive priesthood that has forgotten nearly everything they once knew.

Think a comic book HULK SMASH kind of take on dystopian sci-fi and cosmic horror. If you've ever come across terms like Catholic Space-Nazis or Grimdark, Warhammer 40,000 is what they refer to. Considering you're a Codexian, you really ought to check it out.

Any one of these basic wounds you are talking about would be enough to largely remove someone from a battle and would certainly be enough to kill them within a few days.


I'm sorry, I think I have confused you with the talk of ultra-bad Crits.

Basically, your entry-level human in the setting has 3 points in all the inherent stuff; strength, brains, to-hit bonus and similar. He'll usually have about 2 points worth of armour on most of his body. He'll most likely be armed with a weapon that does 1d10+3 damage. And he's going to hit stuff he attacks about 2/3rds of the time. Mind that this is the step below newly created PCs.

The average hit guy A inflicts on guy B will do 8-5=3 damage. That's equal to but doesn't beat the guy's toughness of 3, so it's not a critical injury, it's just a basic injury. It does, however, reduce guy B's toughness and one or two other characteristics by 1 point each, from 3 to 2.

Getting a characteristic reduced by 1 point generally translates into a -10% penalty on any and all attempts to do stuff that involves the characteristic and requires a check. For example, suffering 1 basic injury to one of your arms makes you 10% more likely to fuck up your attack and defence rolls. Note that the GW-RPG systems are percentile based, so the numbers I'm talking about are representative of how the shit works, not the actual numbers that it uses.

To suffer a critical, guy B has to take more damage than he has current toughness. So if guy takes damage twice, the second time most likely will be a critical. If he takes damage three times, he's basically down for the count either way. The third time guy B takes damage, his toughness is reduced to 0 no matter what happens, and that means he collapses helpless or unconscious for at least a few minutes.

Right now we're using the RAW critical tables, and the first few results on those are actually less severe than our basic injuries. As it is, right now, you're generally better off if you suffer 3 levels of critical injury to a hit location, than if you suffer a basic injury to that location. It's straight-forward enough to address that bit of silliness, of course, but I think at least a couple of us need to take a good look at Burning Wheel and Hârnmaster before we work any more on our current approach.
 

Father Walker

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I didn't call them an exact match, I said they were conceptually very similar. I made the comparison because I was trying to enable people to participate in the discussion, and people are overwhelmingly much more likely to be familiar with D&D3/3.5/PF than any other TTRPG system. The closest relatives of the GW-RPG systems are probably BRP/CoC, I think. But in the likely event that people reading this topic has no idea what either of those are, such a comparison really doesn't help them understand what I was talking about in the OP.

Yeah, I get it. Problem is that if someone doesn't know WFRP, then he'll probably get a false idea if you compare it to 3E. Thus, his opinion will be worth shit since he's got no idea what he's talking about.

You asked why my group doesn't want a health mechanic that doesn't work equally on the meta and fiction layers. I tried to give you an informative answer. If you didn't want it, you probably shouldn't have asked.

My point is that WFRP has fairly "realistic" HP system in the first place. Characters have low amount of HPs, so you don't even need to hand-wave most of the injuries and stuff. That said, I was just curious what's wrong about it. I sorta get where you are coming from, but still see no point in throwing out pretty decent system from the original game.

Btw, you might want to take a look at Traveller (original one, at least), the game has damage being deducted directly from the character stats.

The problem with the debate you refer to isn't its age. While it is potentially useful to my group to discuss with outsiders why a given mechanic does or doesn't work for us, it's not something you can use to generalise. Or at least, you shouldn't. If you do, the result is that all health mechanics are great and suck ass, because they all work great and totally wreck the game for someone, somewhere.

Well, you've been reiterating old arguments against HPs, sort of. You can have either complex time-consuming systems or simple, yet abstract systems. And that's it, all have been said in this topic, I think.

It's important to us that the product of the system isn't wildly dissimilar to the real world.

And finally, it's important to us that the system can produce extremely over the top grimdark results.

To be honest, I get the impression that you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Nothing wrong with it, since desingning rules is fun by itself (I do it at times). I just fail to grasp what's wrong with the WFRP mechanics that you don't like them. What 40k role playing really needs imo is a loose career system as in WFRP.


Oh, and stop being so TL;DR :troll:
 
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Ulminati

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I rather liked burning wheels way of handling injuries.

I've only just picked up a copy, so I'm not sure exactly how useful it is to us. But at a glance it appears to do exactly what we want to do, so I'm pretty sure you've at least brought us a long step closer to our goal. Thank you very much, Ulminati.

Burning wheel by itself is a fantastic system once people learn it. Especially since BITs (Beleifs, Instincts, Traits) tell the GM what the players would like to include in the story and rewards players for playing their characters rather than monster grinding. Duel of Wits is also the best system I've seen to avoid the problem of a person with the personality of a doormat playing the CHA 20 bard or the CHA 6 barbarian being played by a clever person with a silver tongue. In a system that heavily encourages players to make up their own objectives as they go along it's also a brilliant tool of conflict resolution. "You guys can't agree whether to kill the bandits or take them back to town to face justice? Sounds like duel of wits to me!"

It's also one of the few games where players take an active hand in shaping the story, since creating interesting obstacles from themselves by roleplaying their characters weaknesses and flaws is usually how you get the really tough skill tests you need to advance not to mention an artha pump. Our burning wheel games always feel a lot more like communal storytelling than other systems where it's often a players vs gm mentality that reigns.

Just reading the book by itself can be a bit bewildering. You have to play the game to fully appreciate how well everything clicks together. It has just the right amount of abstraction to keep a good flow going.
 

Misconnected

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Actually, I don't think you understand where we're coming from with the injury stuff. Not that I blame you, I is no so gud wid wurdsies, I think. I appreciate you feel I'm an overly verbose bastard, so you may want to skip the rest of this post.

Assuming you're still reading, though, I'll have a go at re-explaining our issues with the way the GW-RPG systems handle damage and injuries. In order of how big a priority they are for us:

Problem 1: there's a big difference between the factors the GW-RPG systems track, and the factors they represent in-game. As far as we can see, the disconnect between what's happening on the meta layer and what happens within the game, stems from a combination of two things; the range of variable damage, and the use of Wounds (AKA Hit Points).

Problem 2: the damage and injury mechanics have too much of a power curve. Lethality is pretty ideal at low-tier, low-powered play, but it can quickly and will inevitably hit what feels like something that belongs in a Marvel Super Heroes game to us.

Problem 3: the GW-RPG systems are too sub-system heavy. The bare basics track Wounds, Fatigue, Injury Level and Critical Injuries, and it doesn't use a unified resolution mechanic to track them. I'm not saying it's AD&D levels of clunk, but it's not exactly elegant and user friendly.

Problem 4: the Critical Injury silliness is as big a pain in the ass as it is cool, because it regularly brings the game to a halt.

Our alternative method that I hope I've managed to explain clearly already fixes problem 1 entirely. But that's the best thing that can be said about it. Problem 2 it turns on its head. Low-tier play becomes overly lethal, while high-tier play (seems to) work the way we want. Problem 3 it doesn't address at all. And Problem 4 it exacerbates in a number of ways; crits become less spectacular, more frequent, and we'll either have to skip the first 2-3 entries on the RAW tables or write entirely new ones to avoid getting results that mesh really badly with the non-critical injuries.

Burning wheel by itself is a fantastic system once people learn it. Especially since BITs (Beleifs, Instincts, Traits) tell the GM what the players would like to include in the story and rewards players for playing their characters rather than monster grinding. Duel of Wits is also the best system I've seen to avoid the problem of a person with the personality of a doormat playing the CHA 20 bard or the CHA 6 barbarian being played by a clever person with a silver tongue. In a system that heavily encourages players to make up their own objectives as they go along it's also a brilliant tool of conflict resolution. "You guys can't agree whether to kill the bandits or take them back to town to face justice? Sounds like duel of wits to me!"

I'm very curious about this sort of thing, but it's unlikely to be of any great consequence to our gaming. Both the RPG groups I play with are almost scarily into drama and in-character acting. All we really need are social skills to complicate things a bit, and we already have those. I'm very much looking forward to giving BW a close reading, but I suspect additions to the drama end of things would be more hindrance than help.

Just reading the book by itself can be a bit bewildering. You have to play the game to fully appreciate how well everything clicks together. It has just the right amount of abstraction to keep a good flow going.

Heh, I've noticed. I haven't really had time to immerse myself in it yet, but I'm already pretty confuzzled and at least a little bit in love. I'm very much looking forward to playing it with our Not-40K group (the 40K'ers have some sort of weird-ass phobia of narrative RPGs).

It's times like these I'm ever so glad we don't have children. Because I'm struggling to find time for all the cool gaming shit I want to read & play & write & paint & build & ...
 

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